Machine Translation (?)

Welcome to the machine...
According to its developers, quality machine translation - the kind that would put large numbers of human translators out of business - will be available Real Soon Now.

Of course, they've been saying that for the last 45 years or so - not that there have been any real breakthroughs in the underlying program technology during that time. However, the explosion in the availability of computing power has liberated machine translation from the mysterious world of mainframes and allowed it to migrate to garden-variety desktop PCs.

Of the machine translation programs currently available, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the prices of the individual programs and the extravagance of the claims being made for them. Of course, assessing the quality of the results is difficult for users without solid foreign-language skills. Now there's a way to cut through the hype, however. A demonstration version of Systran, one of the most sophisticated of the current generation of machine translation systems, is now available free of charge on the AltaVista Babelfish web site.

Systran is surprisingly modest in its claims - despite its appalling appropriation of the name Babelfish, the universal interpreter in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - and while it is far from perfect, it can be surprisingly good under favorable conditions. For example, if your source material consists exclusively of cleanly written, utterly unambiguous text on a general topic at a second-grade reading level, you may never actually need the services of a human translator.

Of course I'm biased toward human translators, but I will be the first to admit that these programs have their uses. For example, I would certainly recommend them for scanning foreign-language documents or web pages as an easy way to decide which deserve the attentions of a human translator.

Effective translation depends on knowledge of the subject matter and polished writing skills, so it's unlikely that machine translation will get much better than Systran's current offerings until the advent of true artificial intelligence.

To test Systran's capabilities, try an electronic form of Chinese Whispers. Copy a couple of paragraphs from any document you have handy - the contents of this page will also do quite nicely - to your clipboard. Click on the link at the end of this paragraph to open a window to the Babelfish site, paste the text into Systran and have it translated into any of the available languages and back again. Round-robin through the available languages and after two or three trips out and back, even the most straightforward text takes on surreal qualities. Enjoy!